When I first started working on my live video project, I visited these forums frequently. The information for using video with DNN was scarce. We needed to pull the live broadcast signal from a local cable station and broadcast their programming online and eventually, on the iPhone.
While there is some very good advice on the forums and there are some projects out there using various methods of delivery with some success, they are few and far between and none of them met all of our needs.
To start, we had to install a Digital Rapids card at the television station. We used their encoder software with WMS originally, eventually switched to Adobe and are now using Wirecast encoder. Wirecast is the least reliable of the three and we plan to purchase the encoder software that Digital Rapids provides. For now, Wirecast will do.
First, since we are on a dedicated server, we fired upWindows Media Server, pulled the signal from the remote encoder using the IP and embedded a Windows media player in an HTML module, this worked okay, but access was limited for some people and it was discovered that we would never be able to deliver the signal to an iPhone using WMS as the iPhone had particular requirements in the way of codecs. The feed looked great and worked great, for some folks but Mac users couldn’t see the autoplay stream and in general, it didn’t really meet our needs.
My advice for those trying WMS is to remove the ID number in the embedded player code. I could not get it to work until I removed that and all its references.
We then decided to switch to flash delivery for wider appeal and to also solve our iPhone issue. We made a temporary switch to Highwinds video service and implemented the java based JW player to deliver the signal. This worked great but the cost of Highwinds as viewer ship increased would have been in the thousands of dollars. So, we quickly searched for another solution.
Since we have the luxury of being on a dedicated server (or misfortune, depending on your view) We implemented a product called Wowza server. Once the Wowza server live feed application was configured, I created a second JW player on a new HTML page to deliver the video. Once this was working we switched out the iframe reference and our new live broadcast was born.
The iPhone feed, is produced simultaneously in Wowza Media Server. And can be implemented by including a link for iphone users on the web page itself and using the address that references the feed in Wowza, or using the DNN iPhone OWS redirect provided by the very smart guys over at
http://www.dnncreative.com. We opted for the link for now.
When I set out on this journey, the first thing I did was take hard look at DNN because I was not sure how all this would work together. DNN worked fine with all the solutions with the exception of the JW player which would not work directly in an HTML module but works fine on an HTML page, framed in and the aforementioned WMP issue
We used WMS, OVP, Wowza Media Server 2, JW player and embedded Windows media player. All of these items were used successfully with DNN to deliver our live television station broadcast, 24/7.
I hope this helps all you DNN folks out there who are thinking about implementing video on your DNN website and are not sure how best to proceed. I am glad to answer questions.
Here is a list of products we used with success:
http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player/
Beth Vest – Senior Developer/Owner
Dotcomdominion.com – Rule your Domain
beth@dotcomdominion.com